Democrats Hang Iranian Democracy Activists Out to Dry

Bridget Johnson reported on the plight of Iranian democracy activist Abbas Khorsandi today. Sadly, his suffering means nothing to a number of the politicians seeking a stay in the White House.The LA Daily News reported:

Offering carrots to Iran carries a heavy price

Abbas Khorsandi has a dream of democracy.

In 2004, the economics professor in the Iranian town of Firouzkouh was arrested for helping form the Democratic Party of Iran, along with five other activists located in different cities around the country. Khorsandi was tortured and warned to stop his democracy activism, and was released on bail a few months later after suffering a heart attack.

On Sept. 17, the 50-year-old with two small children was arrested again, taken to the notorious Ward 209 of Evin Prison, where it is believed that those who go in stand a much slimmer chance of coming out alive. Charged with taking action against the security of the government and establishing an illegal organization (political party), Khorsandi has been allowed no legal representation and his wife, who has been told to stop coming to the courthouse to inquire about her husband, has only received information about him through another inmate, a human-rights activist who received a five-minute trial with no representation.

Khorsandi’s situation, we’re told, is “grave,” and the only way to save the life of a man with no trial date and whose case is shrouded in morbid silence is to “make noise.”

“We are willing to talk about certain assurances in the context of them showing some good faith,” Obama told The New York Times. “I think it is important for us to send a signal that we are not hellbent on regime change, just for the sake of regime change, but expect changes in behavior. There are both carrots and there are sticks available to them for those changes in behavior,” he said. These bribes could include membership in the World Trade Organization and backing off any aims of “regime change” – in other words, hanging the Khorsandis out to dry.

Would Obama, swiftly becoming the master of confounding foreign policy, have the campfire singalong with Iran before or after he attacks Pakistan?

And why, after all the regime has done, would anyone trust the Islamic Republic to not smile sweetly, accept Obama’s carrot, talk pretty, then whack America over the head with the stick?

This isn’t even just about Obama, whose chances for grasping the Democratic nomination are slim but who can still influence the foreign policy of a ticket as a running mate. He’s offering these “strategies” because they have an audience here in the U.S., where an isolationist like Ron Paul gets a cult-like following and the phrase “avoidance of war at any cost” more accurately describes the anti-war crowd.

It’s about a dangerous ignorance of international ideologies, loyalties, attitudes, extremist movements and the revolutionaries who risk their lives to oppose them.

A recent Gallup Poll had 35 percent of Americans surveyed appropriately opining that Iran was the greatest threat to global stability, putting the Islamic regime at the top of the list. Yet 57 percent of all polled didn’t even know enough about economic sanctions against Iran to give an opinion on the tactic. The poll also had more Americans calling the United States the greatest world threat than nuclear-armed, terrorist-infested, state-of-emergency Pakistan.

Obama and others play off the fallacious refrain that those exercising steadfast opposition to the mullahs’ regime are just trying to start new conflicts with a Napoleonic warlust.

Yet war is often called a “necessary evil” for a reason. Few want the retaliatory fury of a spurned mullahocracy unleashing its “nuclear energy” program on Mideast neighbors. Those with their eyes open know that Ayatollah Khameini’s clan would welcome mass civilian deaths with open arms, even purposely putting women and children (and those elusive gays!) in harm’s way – having seen in Iraq how precision wartime operations can be spun in the P.R. machine to turn Europeans and Americans against their governments.

When it comes down to it, it’s more than just about us. It’s about more than Democratic Party debates. It’s about people like the fledgling Democratic Party of Iran, Abbas Khorsandi, and the other founders arrested across Iran on Sept. 17: Sehpideh Pour-aqayee, Meisam Roodaki, Quasem Shirzadian, Bahrom Rasekhisar and Mansour Fraji.

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